Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] [Ethereal-dev] Plans to support 802.11n

From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 10:14:41 -0700

Jose Graziani wrote:

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...so I'm moving this to wireshark-dev. (There is no reason to expect that any work will be done on 802.11n in Ethereal; the work will be done on Wireshark.)

Is anyone working on 11n support for the capture filters or file formats?

Is 802.11n similar to 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g, in that

	the link-layer header is the standard 802.11 header;

any additional protocol changes are in the form of, for example, new frame types or new tagged values?

If so, then little if any change to libpcap should be needed for capture filters (capture filters are *NOT* implemented by Wireshark, they're implemented by libpcap), and there shouldn't be *any* need for a new file format (802.11, 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g are handled by the exact same file formats).

With bursting, capture filters will probably be difficult, if not impossible, to implement unless a burst of packets is broken up into individual packets, individually handed to the capture mechanism, so that the filters act on each individual packet in the burst.